Friday, April 27, 2007

Losing the console wars

Trick question: Which was the best-selling games console in March 2007? If you answered Wii, you weren't quite right. While the Wii beat both the XBox 360 and the PS3, it sold less than ... the PS2. And the Nintendo DS handheld sold even more. The Wii isn't so much winning the next generation console wars as losing it the least badly. Meanwhile PC games sales for the first quarter of 2007 are up 17% compared to the same quarter of last year, with the sales of the Burning Crusade playing a big part in that. Even the New York Times sees rosy times ahead for PC games.

With all their fancy multimedia and internet capabilities, the next generation consoles are still not as good as a PC for surfing the internet. And if you consider that you need a PC for internet surfing anyway, upgrading it with a decent graphics card and more RAM so you can play games can end up costing you less than buying a PS3! Plus the PC still dominates some genres of games, like MMORPGs or strategy games.

I'm not currently planning to buy any next generation console anytime soon. If by christmas there are more games out for the PS3 that interest me, maybe. But right now I just don't see any interest in buying any one of them.